


My Hero

by RarePairFairy



Series: Fears [1]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Arachnophobia, M/M, Manpain, Sheriff Stilinski's Name is John, manguish, manliness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-13
Updated: 2013-11-13
Packaged: 2018-01-01 08:54:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,058
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1042895
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RarePairFairy/pseuds/RarePairFairy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's one thing Chris finds scarier than werewolves.</p>
            </blockquote>





	My Hero

Chris was out of his seat so fast, the Sheriff had his hand on his gun before he even knew what he was looking at.

‘Kill it,’ Chris said in a strangled voice. He had scrabbled so far backwards in his armchair that he was practically sitting on the back. ‘Kill it. Get rid of it.’

John followed Chris’s line of sight to the coffee table. He didn’t register at first what Chris was staring at, only that, if it terrified the hardened werewolf hunter so much, it had to be either an actual demon or Rachel Black’s face on the last piece of jam toast.

Perched on the very corner of the coffee table was a smallish, fuzzy, fat spider.

Chris swallowed audibly. John was about to call him on a really good joke (if a really dangerous one – his hand was still resting on the handle of his gun), but then he saw Chris’s expression.

Chris was wide-eyed. His feet were tucked under him, hands braced so tightly on the armrest of his chair that his knuckles had gone white. John took his hand off his gun. The spider had travelled from the corner of the table to the corner of one of the profiles John was looking through. There had been a spate of murders recently, all too human in nature, and the pair of them had decided to take advantage of both having a day off to help each other with what Allison was calling “grownup homework”, while she and Stiles did some actual homework in her room.

Chris shifted in his seat with a pained expression. The spider was wandering away from John’s criminal profiles and onto the scribbled-on map Chris had brought out from his study.

Without comment, John slid a sheet of paper from the closest manila folder and got slowly to his feet. Bending over the coffee table, he carefully, slowly coaxed the spider onto the edge, manoeuvring it gently until it was sitting in the centre of the page. It was barely larger than the headings on the file.

‘Squish it,’ Chris said stiffly. ‘Kill it.’

‘That’s not necessary,’ John said, using the soothing voice he usually used on trauma victims. He was still trying to reconcile the two Chris’s in his head when he reached the window; the gun-toting snarky leather-jacket-wearing hunter, and the slightly hysterical arachnophobe half-curled on the armchair behind him.

He opened the window and tossed out the spider, making a show of checking the windowsill to make sure it hadn’t gotten back in before shutting the window and turning around.

Chris had composed himself in record time and returned self-consciously to the exact position he’d been in just before the six-legged intruder had appeared. He pointedly didn’t look up when John returned and sat down. The silence between them before had been comfortable. Now it was heavy with unasked and unsaid questions and statements.

‘Sorry about that,’ Chris said awkwardly after a few moments. He still hadn’t touched the map, though he’d picked up his marker again and begun fiddling with it restlessly.

‘Everyone has something,’ John said with a shrug. He wondered instantly if he was playing it off too much. That had, after all, been a spectacular show of abject terror. He remembered his own stunned silence at the revelation of the Darach’s deformed face. That still gave him nightmares, but he hadn’t exactly shrieked at the time.

‘Werewolves, I can cope with,’ Chris said unnecessarily. ‘Spiders, not so much. Allison usually deals with them.’

John liked that, though he wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was a kind of confirmation that it was okay to hand over the scary things to the kids every now and again. Stiles, after all, was the one who went out with a container of salt after a rainy day and killed the slugs in the yard, or set up the saucers of booze to drown them. John couldn’t bear slugs, not since he stepped on a slug barefoot once as a child. The thought of their grotesquely slick, gooey bodies still made him shudder.

‘Good thing no werewolves have been able to use that against you,’ John said instead, deciding against slug talk in case Chris had a thing about them too.

‘Generally I’ve found that werewolves aren’t that fond of bugs either,’ Chris said, visibly starting to relax. ‘Though I do try to avoid my enemies finding out.’

‘Don’t worry,’ John said with a lopsided smile. ‘Your secret’s safe with me.’

Chris’s look of gratitude was so sincere, John couldn’t help but feel a tangible physical reaction. Chris was, after all, the kind of person to whom image was important. He hadn’t thought so at first. Chris was so good at looking like he didn’t care about his reputation. But that was all a part of his front. He had to look the part of the hunter all the time. For most of his life, it had been essential to be able to appear aloof, strong and fearless, effortlessly so, not just towards his colleagues, but towards his enemies. If he couldn’t be commanding at all times, he could be perceived to have weakness. And he was never allowed to be weak.

That used to annoy John, but now he just felt a little bad for Chris. Not sorry for him; it was impossible to feel sorry for an Argent. He just wanted to be able to tell Chris that it was okay, it was fine if he had to lie down in a dark room with a hot water bottle and an Andrea Bocelli CD and cry for maybe half an hour about how the dishwasher wasn’t working and there was a drain blockage and the car wouldn’t start and weren’t real men supposed to know how to deal with that shit?

But he was Chris’s guy friend, and this was one of the things they did. They pretended to be fearless, tough and in charge together, because it helped. A lot. Their kids were in perpetual danger, and they might lose them or lose each other or lose their own lives at any moment, but at least they could _look_ like they could handle anything.

Chris got up and made coffee and John shuffled his papers back into place, surreptitiously checking for spiders.


End file.
